The Spell

SIXTEEN

Fabulous finials!”

“I know!” Alex stepped backwards through the long damp grass to look up at the top stages of the tower: the hooded niches, the little pinnacles like stalagmites that grew from the ledges of the buttresses, the taller pinnacles, three to each corner and one to each side, that crowned the whole thing. The effect was extravagant, and like many strictly superfluous things it was what he most remembered. Not that he’d ever looked at it properly in the Danny period. Danny wasn’t big on finials, and they had hurried on by.

He turned and watched Nick wandering among the gravestones, stooping and scratching off moss with that pleasant thoroughness he had, the suggestion that even if something wasn’t worth doing, it was worth doing properly. Nick was the first person Alex had slept with who was older than himself, and though at their age it hardly made a difference, there was something, well, restful about it, and solidly grounded, after the jolting berths and squealing point-changes of nights with Danny. The pattern had been broken, since Nick wasn’t a taker, and shared Alex’s own determination to give; his amused absorption in every aspect of Alex’s life, as if Alex’s story were the one thing to master and see the beauty of, had felt almost invasive after Danny’s fidgety indifference.

“I know there’s an interesting wall-painting,” he said, coming back and poking his arm through Alex’s to steer him into the porch. The gesture, like many of Nick’s, seemed to compress time: they were romantic undergraduates from some Oxonian golden age but also a nice old county couple who hadn’t lost their appetite for life. The leap of the latch echoed into the interior, and reminded Alex, who felt warily suggestible today, of the characteristic clatter of the latches in Robin’s cottage; though beyond that there were fainter echoes, of church-visiting on childhood holidays, and of going in to play in the pulpit while his mother did the flowers. It was a sunny October day, and the church, which was unwarmed, was full of light. Nick strode about appreciatively, while Alex, who always believed in reading the instructions, studied the information bat.

The fragment of wall-painting was in the north aisle, and showed Tobias with the Angel Raphael. It was executed in various shades of brown, which merged with the discolouration of the plaster and the rough blots where the plaster had been patched, one of which rendered the angel enigmatically jawless. But the fat little boy could be seen, in his brown jerkin, and holding up his brown fish. Alex said, “It says here it was painted with a brush made from a squirrel’s tail.”

“It’s hard not to suspect an element of conjecture in that,” Nick said.

The angel guiding Tobias had flowing curly hair and a belted tunic; he was about eight feet tall, and strode forwards on a thickly outlined right leg with a very elegant foot – heel raised and long toes taking their purchase on the ground, which was implied by a dandelion-like tuft. It made Alex think of his last day with Danny, on the beach, and the memory was surprising even though this little trip to Dorset was all memory – ever since London he’d been waking himself up from the troubled trance of the past. At the end of that afternoon, he had walked with Danny along the sea’s edge, the sand was firm but sodden with water, and at each step a shiver of silvery light seemed to flash from under their feet. Alex pointed out the effect, in the lyrical but cringing tone that was forced on him by Danny’s coldness, and Danny had merely cleared his throat, with an unamusable downward curl of his big mouth.

Nick hugged him from behind, and they went out of the church. He was being vigorously kind this weekend, and any tension he felt about meeting Justin and Robin, and pottering round the landscape of Alex’s previous affair, was disguised as excitement and a hunger for ancient monuments. “And now the castle!” he said, as they came into the road.

“There’s not much to the castle,” murmured Alex, who was covering his tension less well, and was ready for a drink. “The Crooked Billet is a marvellously unspoilt old pub.”

“Art before alcohol, dear,” said Nick. He was a person who expressed large clear feelings and wants of all kinds and then showed a special charm in tuning and surrendering them to other people’s moods – or at least to Alex’s. “Of course, if you’d really rather not…I know this must be strange for you. You must tell me everything you’re thinking” – a phrase which to Alex always had the effect of a sudden inhibition.

“No, let’s go to the castle.”

They got back into Nick’s car and drove out of the village and along Ruins Lane, which had the stony dryness of summer still, though the chestnuts were already dropping their leaves and there were scarlet shocks of haws in the hedges. One other car was in the car-park – it had a caged rear section for a dog, and the forlorn admonishment about puppies being for life in the window. Nick led the way over a stile, and into the lumpy field where the ruins stood, or crouched. There was one picturesque bit, a towering fragment of the hall, with the airy grid of a bay window high above, and the barred-off opening of a narrow spiral staircase. Next to it was the kitchen, where Alex stooped under the lintel of the fireplace and peered up the chimney to the pale blue chink of sky.

Alex knew he would have loved it here as a boy, with his taste for lonely places; it was somehow akin to a hollow, roughly habitable oak in the woods at school, and to his dusty, torch-lit “house” in the cupboard under the stairs, with the ceiling that stepped down like a trap on the already long-legged child. “I’ve been playing hide and seek,” he used to say; and his mother said, “It can’t be hide and seek if no one’s coming to look for you, darling. It’s just hide.”

He walked off to the edge of the site, where some newly sawn pine-logs were stacked and giving off their fresh vomit smell as the sun warmed them. He watched Nick bustling about the stony knolls, reading the old Ministry of Works signs that said “Storerooms” or “Chapel.” There was an element of conjecture there too, no doubt. He thought how Danny had lived his youth, and followed his appetites, and slept with such a variety of men that you couldn’t see any common thread beyond the blind desire to know the world through sex. The thought made Alex sag with envy and loss, even though he had Nick, and though sex, of course, was not the only way to know the world. He wondered what Danny had meant when he said he loved him, or adored him, and whether meaning something had even entered into it. He clearly had no idea of the psychic shock, to someone like himself, of falling in love. Danny would be a great lover, that would be his career, though he knew next to nothing about love, just as some great musicians knew nothing about music, beyond their gift for making it.

In general he was very happy now. There was something sweet and justified about reliving the solitary excitements of his past in the company of someone as handsome and generous as Nick. Mornings of ruins and evenings of L’elisir d’amore. It must just be the fact of being here again in Litton Gambril that rekindled his sense of surreal and arbitrary injustice. Today, like every day of the past fourteen months, was a part of the life he had thought he would be sharing with Danny, and he was spending it without him, and to that extent he was spending it alone.

The Sicily tickets had come the morning after his return to London. They were to have been a beautiful surprise for Danny, and lay on Alex’s kitchen table, beside the brochure of the Excelsior Palace Hotel, Taormina, with the unforgivable ignorance of mail sent to the newly dead. Coming back into the room, preparing to go to work but still expecting to hear himself phone in sick, he saw the tickets again and started crying quite violently, pushing them around the table with a stiff, unaccepting arm. Later, he put everything back in the envelope, and went into the office.

In the evening he rang Hugh and cried some more through the inadequate medium of the telephone. Hugh said, “I’m so sorry, darling,” with real tenderness, as well as an irrepressible note of vindication.

“These have been the worst three days of my life,” said Alex, sincerely, and believing, in his retentive way, that you could compare one pain with another that was only remembered.

“Tell me again how old he was,” said Hugh.

“He was twenty-three. I mean, he still is.”

“Yes,” said Hugh. “They don’t want the same things as us, you know.”

Alex was so struck by the wisdom of this remark that he instinctively rejected it. “We were madly in love,” he said.

He went round to see Hugh the following evening and they got drunk in his flat before going out for some pasta. As they left the building they had to make their way through a small crowd of theosophists whose grateful expressions he attributed broadly to the effects of a seance. The restaurant was as always half-empty and too brightly lit, as though to draw attention to its meagre popularity. The hand-coloured photographs of Etna and Palermo Cathedral conspired in the gruesome excess of irony which bristles around any crisis.

Alex had favoured and then suppressed the idea several times, but at the end of the meal, loose on Corvo and a couple of grappas, and full of gratitude to his oldest friend, he said, “How would you like to come to Sicily with me next month for a couple of weeks, staying only at the best hotels?” As he said it he found he already regretted it – Hugh would get on his nerves and be a perpetual disappointment as he sat in Danny’s place, Alex would be ashamed of him in his tweed jacket and compromised by him in the Casanova pub and the Perroquet disco…

Hugh was looking down in the sudden flush of delicate feeling, and Alex was moved to see how touched he was, and instantly forgot his regrets – of course it would be better to visit the temples at Agrigento in the appreciative company of someone who sweated classical learning than in a state of sexual distraction with Danny, and anxiety at every moment that he might be getting bored. Not, of course, that he could go with Danny: that was why they were having this conversation, it was the still new fact, and it leapt up like a hot liquid burp in his throat, and brought tears to his eyes.

“It would be marvellous,” Hugh was saying. “But I really don’t think I can.”

“Oh, come on,” said Alex. “You can’t stay in boring old Bloomsbury for ever. It would be fun. Think what a great team we were in Greece, all those years ago.” Though this wasn’t quite how he’d thought of it at the time.

“The thing is, I’m going to be away then myself, actually. This didn’t seem the right moment to tell you, but I’m going off, with a friend, to, er, to Nigeria for three weeks.” Hugh looked shaken to be making this announcement, but couldn’t help smiling. “I’m already having the jabs.”

“Good god!” said Alex, in a tone of cheery alarm. “And who is this person?”

“Oh…he’s called Frederick.”

“I see. I assume he’s Nigerian, is he?”

“What…? Yes, he is.”

“And how old…?”

“Um…he’ll be thirty-six next month – well, whilst we’re in Lagos, as it happens.”

“I won’t ask you how you met him”: at which Hugh looked a little crestfallen, for all his air of thrilled reluctance as the facts came out. He piled and smoothed the sugar in the bowl into a tiny Etna of his own.

“I’ll tell you anyway. I picked him up in Russell Square.”

Alex sat back and nodded at the revealed logic of this fait accompli. He knew what question Hugh wanted him to ask next, and he brought it out with airy courtesy: “What’s his dick like, by the way?” Hugh’s glow of tactfully suppressed pleasure deepened to a triumphant blush.

Alex wasn’t sure, over the following weeks, what he felt about Hugh’s unprecedented affair. He was moving through the obscurely delineated phases of grief, and his reactions to matters outside himself were unpredictably null or intense. In the first few days the slightest pressure made him weep, and he nearly got in a fight with someone he swore at from the car. After that came a phase when he longed to weep, but couldn’t, which seemed perversely like yet another failure. He went round, just for a drink, to meet the boyfriend. Frederick was slender and a little shy, and had a deeply melancholy look even when he was laughing. He enquired, with disconcerting politeness, about the well-being of all Alex’s relatives. As the drinks went down, he grew more and more physical with Hugh, and Alex too came in for brief knee-strokings and lingering smiles. When Hugh went out of the room, Frederick said, “Hugh told me your boyfriend left you.” Alex merely nodded, and Frederick took his hand and said, “Well, I’m more than sure you going to find another one,” with a long glance that was not only flirtatious but had an embarrassing prophetic certainty. Soon afterwards Alex kissed and hugged them both, and left. He was naturally delighted by his friend’s happiness. Those were the words he used to himself as he tried to eliminate the small residual feeling of envy and betrayal.

He had very little contact with Danny, beyond a few impossible phone-calls, one of them an absurdist vignette of blocked communication because of the bad reception on Danny’s mobile. “I said: This has been the worst week of my life,” Alex barked, three or four times, till he sounded more furious than miserable. Danny left a message on his machine to tell him when he was going to California, and Alex groaned at the way that silly idea had been allowed to harden into a life-changing fact. He was sure he would never see him again; and then bleakly soothed by the knowledge that he couldn’t bear to see him anyway. He wrote him a long letter, which he worked on and recast in his head and on paper for days and days, so as to make it reasonable; he dropped it into a pillar-box in Whitehall after work and was immediately terrified that he might reply.

Justin rang several times and asked a lot of questions; he was tender but fairly probing – it seemed almost as though he had found a way to observe the effects of his own breakup with Alex, but from a later, guiltless angle; or perhaps there was an element of atonement. Alex himself, sighing and switching about in his bed, was typically alert to the pattern. This second failure was a shocking reinforcement of the first. And yet he had to admit that there was something ambiguously easier about it too: he already knew the lesson, he knew the bereft amazement of finding that you had unwittingly had your last fuck, your last passionate kiss, your last taxi-ride hand-in-hand in the gloom; and he knew too that on both occasions there had been signals, like the seen but noiseless drum-strokes of a tympanist checking his tuning.

One Sunday in late October he made the long journey right across London to have lunch in Hampstead with a kind colleague from work; and coming out a bit drunk into the street decided he would go up on to the Heath and see if he bumped into anyone. It was a bright blue day, and though by now the warm sunshine was going from the streets, it was still dazzling when he emerged on to the westward slopes of the hill. He wasn’t exactly sure where to go, but he saw a sympathetic-looking man with short grey hair and a darker goatee turn purposefully down a path ahead of him, and followed on at a casual pace, but with a quickening sense that something important was being allowed to happen. He looked about keenly. The chestnuts were already bare, but the oaks were thick with gold and withered green, and a half-denuded poplar stood in a reflecting pool of its own fallen leaves. It was that time of day he loved, when the lowering sun struck right in among the trees and made every branch burn.

He came down into a more shadowy area of woodland, with patchy tall undergrowth and vague paths crackly with beech-mast. There were a number of men mooching about in the bushes. He couldn’t see the man he had followed, though he kept a certain presence in Alex’s mind, as a guide who had silently appeared and disappeared. Now he had to fend for himself, and he was useless at cruising, even in somewhere as unchoosy and anonymous as this. He walked on, had a look at his watch, wondered if he should just go home after all, and then within a few seconds he had stumbled into a large and still relatively leafy bush with a dark, thickset man, and was kneeling in the sex-litter and soft loam with the stranger’s stiffening cock in his mouth. The man chewed gum and looked around, apparently indifferent to the exquisite thing that was being done for him. Occasionally he said “Yeah,” like someone on the phone. Then he pulled his hips back quickly, and nudged out a little load over Alex’s cheek and nose.

As sex it was about the least gratifying Alex could remember; the man was hardly his type, and had clearly had no interest in reciprocating the favour; also his trousers would now have to go to the dry-cleaner’s. Yet the episode struck him as significant. He strode back up through the woods, casually observed by the same waiting men, and down again through the steep narrow streets to the station, with the fascinated feeling that he’d acted out of character. The street-lamps were starting to glow through the odd neutral light after sunset, and the faces of people he passed took on a kind of romance – he couldn’t say why. On reflection he thought you couldn’t really act out of character, and he went in under the arch and down in the lift with the sense that he had just paid a visit to a remote suburb of himself. Through the following days he sometimes remembered the taste of the stranger, the roughness of seam rivets and stitching in his thick denims, the heavy atmosphere of permission in the wood. In bed, the event took on a beauty it had lacked at the time, and Alex thought he’d quite like to see the man again.

In December there were parties in the early evening, and he would often find himself, about nine o’clock, speedy and unselfcritical with drink, stepping back out into the clinging chill of the night, and ready for the new kinds of fun he had learnt from Danny. He saw he had started to recoup the Danny disaster in an obscurely private way. He had an appetite for drugs again, but no clear idea how to get some. He knew it would be a bad idea to ask his secretary. He’d heard that the murmuring boys you walked past in clubs would happily sell you paracetamol or household cleansers, and he knew they could tell that he was a patsy. He hadn’t kept in touch with Danny’s friends, but he still had Jamaican Bob’s number, and one night when he got home he gave him a ring.

“…yeah I know, that’s his problem,” Bob was saying as he answered. “Hello.”

“Oh, is that Bob?”

“Yep.”

“It’s Alex here – Alex Nichols.” There was the sound of several people discussing something, a television on. Alex heard the tension in his own voice, and when he looked up at the mirror he saw his fawningly needy expression.

“You’ll have to help me,” said Bob.

“Danny’s friend…?” And that turned out to be a hard phrase.

“Oh yeah, I remember. You’re the one who falls in love.”

“That’s me.” Alex chuckled obligingly. He had a feeling you mustn’t mention drugs by name. “Bob, you know your auntie…?”

“I’m sorry my friend, I can’t help you,” said Bob. “Bad timing, yeah?”

“Oh…” Alex wasn’t sure if that just meant he should ring back later, or if it was code for some major fuck-up in the international traffic.

“I just got a card from Dan, as a matter of fact. You heard from him lately?”

“Not for a bit,” said Alex.

The next day after work he thought he might try Dave at the porno shop again; he was always reliving the sublime hour, or half-hour, he had spent in a shirtless embrace with him and Lars back in June, and he couldn’t believe that that wasn’t a very special memory for Dave as well. When he got there he studied the menu of the next-door Chinese restaurant for a minute, then darted aside through the horrible bead curtain. It had never occurred to him that the patterns of employment among porn-peddlers might be somewhat erratic, and that Dave might not be there. But that was the case. A cheerful Irishman in late middle age was warming himself at a fuming Calor-gas stove beside the counter. “Yes my friend,” he said.

“Oh…er…” Alex turned away and looked quickly up and down at one or two cellophane-wrapped magazine covers, like someone with bifocals at an art gallery. Three men in leather harnesses and haircuts of circa 1970 were grouped around the tethered body of a fourth. A glowing young blond smiled back as he sprawled over a pool’s edge, buttocks spread – he was a bit like Justin, except of course that Justin couldn’t swim. Alex realised he couldn’t face enquiring after Dave, he felt disadvantaged enough being here at all, amid the alien porn. It would surely be culpably obvious why he needed Dave. He bought an optimistic pack of rubbers and hurried out.

He had just turned along Old Compton Street when he heard his name shouted. This only ever happened when some popular person called Alex was by chance within a few yards of him, but he looked across the slow-moving traffic, and there, hand up like a referee, and choosing his moment to dart between the taxis, was Lars himself. He gave Alex a kiss and asked him what he was doing. Alex said “Nothing,” with a kind of smiling passivity – it was distinctly magical that he had appeared at this moment, sparkly-eyed and breathing a pale cloud into the night. His blue puffer-jacket showed a Norwegian respect for winter, but it was open to display his muscular chest and stomach in a tight white T-shirt. Alex loved having been claimed by him on the busy street.

They went into a bar that he and Justin had used in the early days of their affair, though it had been fiercely refitted since then as a high-tech cruising tank. Fast dance-music was playing, it wasn’t great for conversation, but Alex felt the tingle of arrival again. He grinned at Lars, and started to wonder if there was any reason they shouldn’t have sex; then saw that he was running ahead of himself. When he was cheerful, as he had been once or twice in recent weeks, there was something manic and fixated in the emotion.

“So,” said Lars, clinking his beer-bottle against Alex’s, “it’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

“Been busy?”

Alex blinked. It was a common formula that he thought must have some criminal meaning. He was never either busy or not busy. “Oh, you know,” he said. All he wanted Lars to be clear about was that he’d spent the past twelve weeks in heart-break. That was his story, and he’d had frustrating evenings with people who’d failed to grasp it. Sometimes he was childish enough to act miserable, to get attention. Sometimes he said, “I’m just so miserable,” and people thought he’d said, “I am, as always, fine,” or if they did understand they began to talk spaciously about some minor success they’d had.

“Well of course I heard about you and Danny,” Lars said, not flippantly, but with a suggestion that it was all a long time ago. “I guess Danny’s just not ready to settle down. If he ever will be.” Of course that was the trite official line. Alex was pretty sure Lars had had a fling with Danny, after all everyone had; but he wasn’t yet ready himself for that fondly sceptical tone. In fact now that they were talking about it he couldn’t quite think what to say. Lars said, “Sure, he’s a fun guy, but he’s not exactly Mr Reliable. Anyway I hope you’re not wishing now that you’d never met him.”

“If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be with you tonight,” said Alex, in the bar’s blue compensatory gleam.

Lars had something amusingly on his mind. “Do you know, I think that is the only family I have met where the father is even hotter than the son.”

“Oh…” said Alex. “I know some people do, um…” It was beyond him at times to grasp what they’d done to him. First the father smashed him up and then the son. They were terrifying to the outsider, like the Doones of Exmoor or something. “What is it they’ve got? The Woodfield…” – Alex pouted and shook his head.

“The Woodfield wotsit,” Lars said.

“That’s right.”

“Oh boy. Sometime, I will tell you a little story. But not now.” And he smiled like Danny used to, like all these boys on the scene did as a glimpse came back to them from their huge cross-indexed files of sexual anecdote; then he straightened up. “So, have you been out?” he said.

“No,” said Alex; and with a rather sly pathos: “I haven’t had anyone to go out with.”

Lars didn’t rise to this immediately. “That was Chateau, am I right, where I saw you and Danny?”

“Absolutely!” said Alex. He thought if he took his time Lars might suggest they went there again. A week ago he had found himself driving past it, the shutters down and padlocked, the neon logo grey and indecipherable in the dank late morning. It was a narrow facade, like a little old warehouse, with a mouth and two blacked-out eyes; the ordinary commuter could never have guessed what dreams unfurled behind it.

“Well it’s not so good at the moment.”

“Oh?”

“As you may know, they got raided. Last time half the queens are standing there just with a beer or whatever. Not so great for techno dancing.”

“I should think not,” said Alex, who felt he had been personally insulted; and then went on craftily, “Anyway, you can get the stuff somewhere else, obviously.”

Lars glanced round and then shrugged his jacket back to show more of himself. Maybe it was just Alex’s habit of idealising anyone he found attractive, maybe Lars wasn’t Mr Super-Reliable himself, but for the moment the boy seemed to have it all. He said, “Sure, we don’t have to go there. And don’t worry, darling, I can get you anything you want.”

Nick went back to the car for the bottle he’d insisted on bringing, and Alex waited by the gate, looking down at the cottage through the yellowing trees. Now that they were here the reasons for the visit escaped him. He didn’t like Robin, and he knew he was going to fuss over Nick and Justin to make sure that they saw the best in each other. It irked him that Justin had stayed with Robin after the promising disaffection of last year. At Christmas they had sent out a specially printed card, with a picture of the cottage on the front, under snow; it took Alex a minute to work out that they had signed each other’s names. And here the cottage still was, with them inside it, under that smothering lid of thatch. From above you saw thin smoke fading above the chimney, and vivid pink roses. Alex thought of arriving here and seeing Danny’s pink tank-top hanging from a deck-chair, like a mark of casual possession. He thought of Danny in uniform at the Royal Academy, and Danny’s account of his admirers pressing their numbers on him, like dollar-bills in a stripper’s G-string. He thought of Robin, barging in to find them naked and dozy after sex, saying, “Christ, Dan, you can’t be serious.”

It was Robin who let them in, wearing a short apron over his jeans, and a patch over his left eye. Alex murmured concern about the patch, though he was privately very pleased by it, and felt it balanced out his own social disadvantage as a double Woodfield casualty. Robin said it looked worse than it was, and excused himself to get on with the lunch. Justin was in the sitting-room reading the paper, and plucked off a pair of frameless spectacles as they came in. “I saw that,” said Alex, giving him a big moaning hug, and grinning at the shock of how much he loved him.

“Don’t, darling, it’s like Moorfields in here,” said Justin. He looked affectionately at Nick and said, “Hello, darling,” as if they were old friends agreeing to forget a tiff. For once Alex saw that a formal introduction was unnecessary. He stepped back with a feeling he shouldn’t intrude on a tender episode, one that was novel to him, and unexpectedly rich – the meeting of two of his lovers, with its momentary sequence of hidden appraisal and denial.

The room was subtly altered, and more cluttered. Other little pictures of a very different taste – Regency silhouettes and framed caricatures – filled in the gaps between the family portraits and Robin’s creepy watercolours of the cottage. Several highly varnished pieces of furniture – a magazine-rack, a china-cabinet, a nest of scallop-edged side-tables – had been thrust into an unlikely marriage with the resident arts and crafts. Alex realised that these were things saved from Justin’s father’s house. He strolled towards the book-shelves, saw something else, and after a moment’s consideration let out a shriek. On the deep window-sill, turned sideways to catch the best of the sun but glaring back into the room in a consummate sulk, was the polished bronze head of Justin, aged twelve, that Alex had always found so amusing. “I see you’ve salvaged “The Spirit of Puberty,” darling,” he said.

Justin came across, his features perhaps unconsciously jelled into an adult version of the same expression. Alex watched him decide he could take the joke at last. “You mean the Litton Gambril Ganymede. Yes, darling. Though the insurance, as you may imagine, is a frightful drain.” Nick stood around behind them, in a leisurely uncertainty about the pitch of irony.

They went into the kitchen for drinks, and Nick drew out Robin – who kept twitching his head round to find things -by asking him about the castle and other local landmarks. Apparently Robin had been building some more flats in that hideous house they’d all been dragged off to see on Alex’s first visit, but the nice old boy who owned the place had died, and the plans had all come to nothing. Robin spoke about all his wasted work as though that were the real tragedy of the thing.

Justin was clearly bored to the limits of endurance by the subject, and tugged Alex gently through the back door into the garden.

“I’m sorry about Captain Blood, darling,” he said, when they were more or less out of earshot.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” said Alex.

“No, I don’t think so. He burst a blood vessel, and it’s all gone rather horrid.”

“Does that mean he’s lost his sight?”

“Oh he can see,” said Justin. “But it looks so frightful for everyone else. I had to get him to cover it up.”

Alex wasn’t sure who was being protected by this. “How did it happen?”

“In bed, darling. Apparently it’s caused by sneezing, or vomiting, or, um…Of course now I don’t dare suggest sex, in case it happens to the other one. He’d have to wear a blindfold!”

Alex took a swig from his bloody Mary. They were standing at the low wall between the lawn and the long grass, where he had found Justin sunbathing on that day last summer, which was also the day he had first set eyes on Danny. He felt very confident with Nick, but still he wanted Justin’s approval, or at least some palpably jealous withholding of it. “It’s good to be back here,” he offered blandly, staring out towards the stream and the rise of the hill beyond, and feeling again the mood of sexual jostling and sarcasm that went so oddly with the pastoral unconsciousness of the place.

“You should see it in winter,” said Justin. “There’s nothing but those sort of dead brown plants.”

“Docks, you mean.”

“Mm.” Justin looked into his glass and shook the vivid last half-inch. “Well, you’ve found yourself a real man this time, darling.”

“I think so,” said Alex, though Justin’s implicit self-disparagement took the zest out of the thing.

“You didn’t tell me much about him.”

Alex said, “It seemed rather bad manners.”

Justin said, “You say you met him in a club,” with a wary, judicial tone that almost masked his envy of the world of meetings…

“Yes.”

“So you just go to clubs now, do you?”

Alex smiled; and of course it was sweet to be teased on the subject. “I went out with that boy Lars, Danny’s friend, you remember.”

“Oh yes. I think General Dayan’s rather keen on him.”

“That’s because he’s a retread of you, dear. In a way. He’s what you’d be like if you were twelve years younger, came from Oslo, and lived in a gym.”

Justin seemed to find that satisfactory. “Well, I’m impressed that you threw him over for someone twice his age.”

“Nick’s only forty-one,” Alex said. And of course it hadn’t been quite like that, he hadn’t been sure if something was happening with Lars or not, and it was only when Lars said that if Alex didn’t move in on Nick, he would, that Alex began to understand what was possible – or, as it seemed through the empathetic lens of the drug, inevitable. “He was terribly friendly,” Alex went on. “You know, it could have been the friendliness of a lunatic or a bore, but in fact he’s only a little bit of either.” He saw he was keen not to wound Justin by praising Nick’s real merits.

Justin said, “Well, you’re used to lunatics, darling. Have you heard from Miss D., by the way?”

“I had a card about…ooh, nine months ago. How about you?”

“He was here for a few days in the summer, with a shattering Spanish boyfriend. They seemed happy,” said Justin, who was perhaps less careful of Alex’s feelings, though he gave the impression of speaking from outside some conspiracy of happiness.

After lunch Nick said he wanted to see the cliffs, and Robin said he knew the best place to go. Justin refused to take part in the outing if Robin drove, and told Nick with uncomfortable candour about the time when they had all nearly been thrown to their deaths. Alex was drinking pretty intently, since for once he wasn’t driving; so it was agreed that Nick would take them. Robin sat up front with him to give directions.

When they turned into the narrow lane at the end of the village, Nick said, “Going up!” and powered ahead, just as Robin had done; it was some boyish physical thing that Alex had never had. He sprawled back and touched the button to let in a rush of air. The banks were high on either side, and the hedges above were festooned with the soft swarming stars of traveller’s joy, already turning grey and mothy. One or two brown fans of chestnut leaves dropped across the bonnet. As before, there was no one coming the other way.

Robin got out when they reached the gate, and Alex thought how enjoyable it would be to leave him there, and watch him running up to meet them, pretending he took it as a joke. Nick drove through and waited for him, watching in the mirror, till he came back and opened his door and said, “I’ll run the last mile. Just keep going towards that gap.” So they bumped on without him across the steep incline, the grassy tussocks hissing along the bottom of the car. Alex looked aside and saw the whole panorama inland come steadily clear, the line of ascent from the valley bottoms, the silage-heaps weighted with old tyres, little fields overgrown with alder, up past sheltered farms under hanging woods and low bald pastures, and on to the open hilltops, the windwalks and long ridged heights.

They came into the wide dip between the two swelling caps of cliff, and Justin said, “This is quite far enough, darling, thank you.” Nick stopped, and they climbed out and walked the last hundred yards. The air freshened towards them, and though the long grass was fading and scruffy the wind seemed to buff it and put a shine on it as it laid it flat.

Justin stopped a prudent distance from the crumbly edge, and Nick and Alex, who had gone on romantically further, came back, with the humorous good conscience of a successful couple, and took hold of him in a slightly awkward embrace, Justin clutching at the pocket of Alex’s denim jacket. Then Robin’s panting could be heard through the bluster of the wind and above the distant crash of the waves. He came up beside them, roaming round with hands on hips to get his breath back, and then decided to join them, and dropped an arm round Nick’s shoulder, at the end of the line. For a minute or two they watched the inky zones of the sea-bed, as the small cloud-shadows sailed across them; then as the sun dropped westward, the surface of the sea turned quickly grey, and they saw the curling silver roads of the currents over it.